Reading Seal’s music II

I may have figured out what is going on in “Dreaming in Metaphors,” with a hint of irony too because what Seal is talking about in this track is indeed something that is lost. I’ve mentioned the track in a previous post, commenting on its overlap with themes explored in another track, “Crazy,” where I take Seal to be expressing, with angst, an incredulity at people’s inability to want to save their fellow human beings, before, that is, it is too late.

This incredulity I take to register a skepticism, the Cavellian sort, which denotes a mystification not necessarily at another’s existence, but at our own need for intimacy versus another’s seeming lack of such a need. The idea of dreaming in metaphors certainly extends a motif of incredulousness at the callousness of others—not a callousness toward others but perhaps a callousness towards oneself and one’s needs, which means that the subjective expression of a need for intimacy, rendered in “Dreaming in Metaphors” as a need for wholeness, is one that ought to be shared. If it is not, the fault perhaps is in ourselves and not heaven.

To ask why we dream in metaphors is to ask, in one sense, why it is that language functions in anything other than a constative register. The logical positivists had little patience for metaphors and would probably ask, like Seal does, why we ought to dream in them anyhow. So this plea of ‘why?’ is essentially a plea for language, a language with a consistent, even a clear and distinct, meaning. But language is hardly ever clear and distinct; only (certain) ideas are. So the plea obviously expresses an exasperation with or in the expression of ideas.

I hear exasperation when Seal claims that (or asks if?) “life will always stay the same,” followed by “life will ease your pain.” He wants to find someone “peaceful and nonjudgmental”—fair enough, but in order for this person to hold him back. So what he is asking for is for someone to curb his desire, which means a return to some state or stage when desire was satiated fully. The obvious stage is childhood; so is Seal asking for a lover or a mother?

He is asking to be made “whole” (“with life”) which means, to some degree, asking for it to stay the same, as though flux reduces wholeness. But later in the track, he tells us about those having lost faith “in seeking God” who then turn to the needle—an invocation of drugs of course, as catalyst to achieving the sort of wholeness lacking in a world without God. When Seal asks “Tell me what’s going on with your life,” he is addressing his interlocutor with a mix of compassion, disappointment and reproof because certainly whatever wholeness we want should not come via, or be abetted by, drugs.

Yet the infantilism sometimes assumed with a desire for wholeness, as though a fractured life constitutes a “grown-up” existence, is not reiterated here. Nor do I think that Seal equates drug use (necessarily) with infantilism. What he does consider childish, perhaps, is the desire for instant gratification; so a desire for wholeness should not be expected instantly. But then, it seems Seal is reproving others for their desperateness, and this is not something I’m willing to believe Seal is capable of.

So is it silly or childish to want wholeness in the first place or is merely the use of drugs to achieve such wholeness what is worthy of reprove? I’ll answer each question in kind. To the first, the idea that a return to wholeness is indicative of a desire to return to childhood means that whatever we take wholeness to be or mean, it necessarily stands at a retroactive remove from where we are. That is, a move towards wholeness is necessarily a move backwards. There is no progressive movement towards wholeness. Should there be? Seal answers this question, to my mind, in another track, “Don’t Cry”:

When we were young
And truth was paramount
We were older then
And we lived a life without any doubt

If truth is only paramount – meaning truth is all, i.e., all the time, not something to be strived for – when “we were young,” then so too is there no progressive movement toward truth. Indeed, the increasing fragmentation of experience and senses as we grow older means that it is the process of flux that infantilizes us and we are actually older (say, wiser) when we are young, afforded a life, that is, without any doubt. Can we possibly say, for example, that armed with this truth we are somehow more vulnerable?

We say so, obviously, in hindsight and in some attempt at redeeming the passage we have suffered. But it is part of the inadequacy of this account of passage that I hear Seal expressing when he asks why we dream in metaphors—why, say, we are forced to “argue” out meaning (invoking the dialectic) if peace, a peace we’ve already known, “is our one salvation” anyhow. Is Seal expressing tragedy? In a Cavellian sense he is, because to register skepticism (in philosophy) is to register tragedy (in literature). The idea that progress cannot save us, despite even happy turnouts, is expressed nicely here by Eagleton, who also invokes the tragic:

Marxism is not generally seen as a tragic vision of the world. Its final Act—communism—appears too upbeat for that. But not to appreciate its tragic strain is to miss much of its complex depth. The Marxist narrative is not tragic in the sense of ending badly. But a narrative does not have to end badly to be tragic.

Even if men and women find some fulfilment in the end, it is tragic that their ancestors had to be hauled through hell in order for them to do so. And there will be many who fall by the wayside, unfulfilled and unremembered. Short of some literal resurrection, we can never make recompense to those vanquished millions. Marx’s theory of history is tragic in just this respect.

Why must we go through the hells we go through to achieve the successes we do?

Secondly, is Seal reproving drug users for their desire for immediate access to wholeness, or truth, suggesting they ought to suffer, say, the burdens of passage and put more faith in the dialectical discovery procedure, hence renounce drugs? But it is precisely that discovery procedure that puts human beings at risk –and all for the sake of “discovering” something which, at one point they had but have now lost. Why is this the case? Here again Seal can only turn to incredulity.

When he asks, then, in somewhat reproving tone, “What’s going on with your life? Has it stayed the same?” part of his own disgust comes from the fact that he cannot answer, definitively, that it has all turned out badly (because of drugs), or, conversely, that it would have turned out much better had you only renounced drugs. Drugs may be bad; but is a commitment to the dialectic any better? The overlap in lyric here, between “Has it stayed the same?” (inquisitive) and “Life will always stay the same” (definitive) means that Seal is certain of one thing: the conditions of the world make it impossible to know what is more treacherous, drugs or the dialectic. These conditions the universe repeats.

Hence Seal can only reiterate the same sort of desperation that caused those to “turn to the needle” in the first place

Why do we dream in metaphors?
Try to hold onto something we couldn’t understand?

concluding with the reminder that the salvation we seek is now “lost” implying that we indeed once had it. What sort of cruel cosmic joke or trick is it to initiate the dialectic discovery procedure not for something unrealized, but something wanting, i.e., something we have felt to have existed before? How to reclaim it if, lacking language or expression, we find that the very possibilities we were privy to when we were younger are destined to be lost or made unrealizable to a (false) dialectic?

That is, if all dialectics are false – because in their very dynamism they miss or misconstrue what is permanent, static – why should we commit to one to reclaim what we believe to be permanent or static about the universe? Are we more vulnerable when we have the truth but cannot express it, or when we express it inadequately, making a false claim to strength and knowledge, denying a world we have felt to exist in favour of one that others insist does?

So the dialectical discovery procedure in fact details something of compromise not with the world, but with language, what we use to describe the world, which itself comes to makeup the world. It may be our lot, over the course of our lives, to attempt to transcend these compromises, but what’s the use when, in the end, even if we do, we may not be spared from tragedy?

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